disintegrated
by justbecauseofthis
Summary: While crossing the Quantum Abyss, a melange of fragments barrages Keith, and he doesn't know which of them have already happened, or will happen, or will never happen. Some of the visions Keith experiences occur post-season 8.


**and in the time between . . .**

"It's good to have you back," said Keith.

"It's good to be back," said Shiro.

Keith didn't mention the white in his hair and avoided that particular example of irony. Although irony was less like a pattern, and more like a language—even more like an addiction. Keith wasn't quite addicted to language. Only infatuated with it, unrequitedly. A little jealous too. Irony was logical (or perhaps just pathological), more of a coping mechanism of his psyche than confession and sounding-sessions were.

The sun was sinking below the mountain range. The wind had picked back up again.

Together they watched dusk fall and bruise the desert.

In the short time ahead, Keith would learn he was part Galra. And, Yes: In hindsight he should have known he wouldn't—couldn't—have been insinuated into the world by any other means, by any other slot-combination. Of course. Obviously. How could he have been so clueless? so shortsighted?

"So what happened out there," Keith said, and looked across his shoulder. "Where were you?"

"I wish I could tell you," Shiro said. Orange expiring light hit his face and slid over the cryptic scar running across the bridge of his nose. "My head's still pretty scrambled." Then he looked at Keith too. "How did you know to come save me when my ship crashed?"

Keith said: "There's something you should see," and led Shiro back into the house.

**a fragment**

The universe was at war with an imperial alien race. Keith was at war too. One half of himself resisted the other. Grinded against it. Flirted: _Don't you want to know who you are and why and how and all those other selfish questions? _It all happened in his veins, all at once, all the time, before he'd known it'd been happening, perhaps all his life. A symptom of his addiction, probably. Because it was quite clear Keith didn't like himself anyway (Keith wasn't a guy of much originality from the beginning: poor backwater kid, single-parent home, chip on his shoulder, the works). Now, he could feel out-of-place in body just as much as he felt out-of-place in mind, a physical and mental dislocation.

Keith had always been unoriginal.

"The Red Lion is temperamental," said the princess, "and the most difficult to master. It's faster and more agile than the others, but also more unstable."

So when Shiro's hair had grown long, Keith didn't want to accept it.

Never surrender.

_You,_ said Zarkon, _fight like a Galra soldier._

Victory or —

# # #

The wolf shoved its nose into a dry, moribund pile of fallen leaves. Its head jerked up. A sharp breath shot from its nostrils. The stick lay, unreturned, three yards away now.

"It's not a domesticated animal, Keith," said Krolia. "It won't know how to play games like fetch."

"Can't it learn?"

"Wild animals don't have the same biological social cognition as pets."

"So it can't learn."

"I guess we won't know unless you keep trying."

Krolia sat on a log near the dead campfire. The smell of smoke still lingered, soaked deep in the soil. Keith smelled it clinging to his hair too. Krolia and Keith faced the same direction, Keith a few yards back, looking at Krolia from behind. Through the crackle of leaves, Keith approached. He couldn't see Krolia's hands. On that log, she could've been sitting completely motionless with her neck and shoulders bent like a pensive statue.

Soon the sound began to edge into his hearing: the blade's threshold moving against the block of wood, imperceptible to human ears. Keith came from behind Krolia's shoulder, looking for her hands, braced in the middle of her knees; the one holding the knife; the other, the block. An image began to emerge, not as though the image had been planted there by the knife, but as though the image had resided in the wood all along and the knife merely disclosed it.

Krolia put away the knife, her hands going still on her knees. The image stared out of the wood block from pupil-less angled eyes. "To think that my son," she said, "would grow up to become a paladin of Voltron."

"Yeah, well," he said. "Not anymore."

Krolia lifted the carving over her shoulder. With a slight hesitance, Keith took it and held it the way a person holds an old mirror compact, staring into the face staring back at him, thoughtfully unrecognizing.

Krolia didn't have to look up to know another wave of time was collapsing on them.

"I need to thank that other paladin for taking care of you," she said, "when your father died. Wasn't his name—"

**a fragment**

"Shiro?" and Keith took Shiro's hand, the mysterious fleshless metal one, never looking twice, never thinking twice, drawn onto his feet again. Pressure welled in Keith's chest, as if he were being pulled from each end, stretched out into nothingness, not dead, not dying. But stretched straight out of existence

: _who am I, where am I? why am I here? _

"Kolivan said you lasted longer than anyone else."

The losing battle felt good, though Keith would never admit it. He channeled anger and fuel from a terrible reckless pathos, translating it into a strength that thundered from muscle to muscle and bone and blood, a nonetheless anticlimactic strength that felt good in real-time, and lasted just as long, as if he could fail while still maintaining an unbruised ego, completely hypothetical, perhaps paradoxical, and not even Shiro could distract him from it_ (you fight like). _

"Just give them the knife." Shiro was bareheaded, helmetless, visorless, his face out in the open, entirely visible. "And let's get out of here."

"I can't give it to them, Shiro."

"You're only thinking of yourself"—Keith looked up into Shiro's helmetless exposed face; Shiro's expression was foreign, almost artificial—"as usual."

The one-half said: _Surrender._ The other half said: _Never._

You, said Zarkon, fight like—

And then Shiro was saying: "You already know who you are."

And then Shiro was saying: "Is that a hologram?"

Shiro stared across the platform at the holoscreen display, his arms folded, the visor clapped over his eyes. It hadn't been lifted since docking, half his expression paneled behind it. Shiro watched his own exposed, helmetless face on screen.

"His suit," said Kolivan, "has the ability to create a virtual mindscape, reflecting the wearer's greatest hopes and fears. And at this moment, your friend desperately wants to see _you_."

On the display, Keith said: "You're like a brother to me, but I . . .," and looked straight into Shiro's eyes (and now Keith thought to himself, Maybe Lance was right: Keith had relied on qualifiers, just like irony relied on logic. But then again, there was no unbreakable, exclusively correct law of logic).

"You're messing with his mind." Shiro put his arms down. His shoulders turned away from the display. Kolivan put his hands down too. Shiro said: "You're going to kill him."

"Knowledge or death," Kolivan said, "Shiro."

Shiro turned his shoulders away fully now and started toward the door. "I'm calling this off."

Then Shiro, not wearing the helmet now, looked coldly at Keith, saying: "Then you've chosen to be alone." He turned away and a great rectangle of light poured in from the opening door, spreading over Shiro, washing out his silhouette, reducing him to a dark faceless reminiscent figure from where Keith watched, falling behind, feeling an invisible line dragging him by the chest, compelling him forward. His legs jerked into a run. "Wait, Shiro!" He reached, lurching after the dark faceless figure-shape of Shiro walking away, helmetless, overcome by the great outpouring light.

Then Keith opened his eyes without even remembering they'd been shut and found Shiro's shoulder leaning support into his side, bracing him upright, his arm wrapped around Shiro's neck (_what's happening?_, thinking it, maybe even speaking it out loud).

Now the helmet's visor was drawn protectively over Shiro's eyes, and beneath their boots the platform thundered and shook, and Keith could see Shiro's teeth as he lifted his lip, saying, "Get out of the way. We're leaving," then the Galra drew their weapons, replying, "Give up the blade," and lunged; and Shiro's right arm blurred, quick, with its biomechanical violence, clashing with Kolivan, the entire room rumbling—another wave of time began to flare over them. And Krolia shouted: 'Brace yourself.'

**a fragment**

It had only been a few months after he disappeared, but Shiro's hair fell all the way down his back, that strip of white running down the middle of his scalp like a wide seam. Like two halves. Two minds. Two equal parts. And when Keith had relinquished to the part of himself that didn't believe in being alone or the inviolability of solitude, an ineffable heat sang across his hand, throbbing from the bequeathed Galra blade, like a universal heartbeat. He had connected not only with the past but with the ancestral blood-connection across infinite space and time.

The blade had awoken. And where the halves of himself resisted, Keith felt a momentary armistice.

Patience, he remembered, yields focus.

# # #

This rain was not like Earth's rain. The rain seemed to move with gravity and against it, neither rising nor falling, sliding on threads like glass beads, spattering the forest, dipping leaves and trees with pearls of sporadic weight. Keith and Krolia sat under the shelter of the canopy. The wolf lay asleep between them.

"I'm starting to lose my foothold," Keith said. "I don't know if what I'm seeing's part of the past or the future."

"It's both, Keith." Krolia had dispossessed her armor, sitting in only the lightweight bodysuit. "Past, present, and future occur instantaneously."

"Then where are we now?" Keith said. She told him. He said, "How can you be sure?"

"I can't be. It's uncertain time here."

Keith bent his head back against the tree. Above them stars died and spun away into vortexes of silent black voids.

"It'll be all right," she said. Keith listened. Krolia's voice seemed to begin a few inches closer to him than where she sat, as if voice and speaker had been sifted and pulled apart. Keith inhaled. The veil of rain smelled nothing like Earth's rain. "We'll make it across," she said. "Remember our goal, and don't lose sight of it."

**a fragment**

It was like leaping from stone to stone across a thundering river. Each vision taking him in a different direction: backward, forward, left, right, all tangled together now. So it wasn't like leaping forward or backward or left or right. It was like leaping across lateral parallel lines, across displacements, without quite surpassing the transitional state, like a timeless hand of a massive clock charged with friction about to shift, never reaching the next second, fixed in unending suspense.

Keith nearly lost balance and found his feet again, not knowing where he was, not knowing in which direction he was going, moving regardless, and never stopping.

"Shiro, you made it," he said.

"—it takes more than a glowing alien wound, a fall from the upper atmosphere, and crashing into a hard pan surface to get rid of me." Through the communicator, Shiro sounded vague, distracted, as though he didn't quite know he were speaking at all. Keith's vision went out of focus with listening. He climbed through bleak, barren landscape and listened hard, following the beacon of Shiro's location. Then Shiro said: "How are you?"

"Not good. My lion's busted." Keith took another step forward, thinking, Something's wrong with Shiro. "Wait," he said. "What wound?"

"It's nothing."

But Keith knew it was _something_. Shiro wasn't condescending, he never condescended to Keith, not even when their ages were further apart than they were now. (and Keith saw the two of them together in the past, Shiro more man than not, Keith more boy than not: (Shiro saying: 'these are just some electro-stimulators to keep my muscles loose.' And Keith saying: 'what's wrong with your muscles?' And Shiro: 'ah, nothing')) And when Keith suddenly remembered Shiro's disposition, he further knew that this was _something_ and sprang to another hard-pan edge jutting from the alien desert (not exactly alien to him, almost familiar), and continued, moving in perpetual transitioning un-progression, waiting for that timeless hand to shift to the next second, never making it.

"Hang on." Keith's vision returned. "I'm coming."

**a fragment**

The desert never changed. Mountains rose into the horizon; plateaus cut straight up from the earth; canyons tunneled where strong young rivers once pounded. Now the rivers were old and empty, and occasionally, a weak fruitless cloud would hang in the sky and cast a dry shadow. Crosswinds would dissipate what little water had converged. In the middle of the land, the house stood solitary, singular, like a little blip in a dying flatline. The house never changed either.

His whole life, Keith had known and believed in solitude; it was very easy. Effortless, because it made sense: I'm Me, and You're You, and those dimensions can't be reconciled. They can't even compromise. Solitude was inviolable; it couldn't be broken. _(you guys were right, I'm just a loner. I'm not the leader Shiro thought I was)_ but Keith would later think and realize he should have known: Nothing worth believing in is ever easy.

Muffled voices came from the sergeant's office. Sitting in a chair, pushed up against the wall, Keith heard those voices as if it wasn't his own hearing, as if it were someone else's. He sat, unmoving. A window gave out onto the room where Shiro spoke to the sergeant. Keith did not look inside. By the time Shiro stepped out, Keith was stiffly and coldly sitting forward in the chair, already returning to the desert, to the old solitary house. The house's windows never filled with light anymore, empty dormant black rigid squares. The house remained in the same deteriorated condition of ten years ago, never worsening, just standing in its unreceptive pause. Once a year, Keith watched sunlight slant across his father's gravestone.

His cheek dully throbbed.

Shiro didn't get the chance to speak first. Keith said, "Look. I know I messed up," and he was already seeing the empty house, reverting to the original state before he could stop it, before time could even move backward, suspended in the infinite dusk.

Then Shiro looked at him, uncritically, his hair dark and cropped neat. Keith glared dead ahead.

"I will never give up on you," Shiro said.

Keith rigidly glared.

"But more importantly, you can't give up on yourself."

Then Keith removed his eyes from the nothing he was glaring at and put them on Shiro. Hearing didn't need eye contact; listening didn't need it either. But Shiro already had his eyes on Keith's eyes, waiting patiently for Keith to turn his face because although the hearing didn't need it, when their eyes finally locked, Keith suddenly saw the symbolic dry river bed flowing with water, filling, surging around him, and he found himself high on a tall flat stone, looking out at the turbulent rapids that had once been the lonely progressionless desert withering around him, baked solid and dead, since the time he'd been born.

In the desert, the sun hung low, pinned just on the edge of the horizon.

Outside the sergeant's office, Shiro reached out a hand, and Keith took it.

**a fragment**

Time didn't flow in a straight-line axis. It was a quantum field cerebrum of synapses. And in each electromagnetic pulse, everybody would say what they had already been saying and what they didn't know they had already been saying what they had already said.

When Shiro was nothing more than a disembodied astral projection waiting to be found, Keith didn't have to say what had already been said because he hadn't stopped running across that dead alien earth, listening so hard that his eyes had gone blind. His footsteps impressed upon the expanse of eternal suspense, and somewhere Shiro still waited to be found.

This too: Keith and Shiro sat under a low unfamiliar overcast sky, a campfire shedding light and heat over them. Shiro's ribs glowed with strange luminous dark magic. He sagged against a rock, cold sweat boiling from his skin, his expression like a well shaft with no bottom, sinking straight down, dropping out of sight.

He said: "If I don't make it out of here—" but Keith wasn't listening, the words passively entered his hearing— "I want you to lead Voltron."

"Stop talking like that," Keith said, not listening, just watching Shiro across his shoulder, who sat propped against a boulder like an empty suit of paladin armor. "You're gonna—"

**a fragment**

"—be okay." Rows of countless glowing cyropods cast strange light on Shiro, and his face was sullen and unreadable and strange like it wasn't a face at all, just three inanimate features placed arbitrarily in a flat ceramic plate. He was walking slowly closer, his hands closed as they swung by each thigh, his boots filled with the slow weight of his pace, heavy effortlessness, machinelike against the Galra facility.

"Yes," Shiro said. "I know," and he continued forward, with eyes that contained two red rings, as if he were looking directly into a light and the light had absorbed all of his attention, the sum of his concentration, his chin lifted into it, with nothing but the light penetrating his senses.

Keith didn't move yet.

"We just have to get back to the castle," Keith said. Not moving yet, not getting ready yet, not even thinking about getting ready yet, just standing in the middle of the platform, surrounded by glowing embryotic pods.

Shiro's eyes couldn't see Keith. Only the red light pierced his pupils, pouring out of those pods, pumping straight into his senses as he came closer, "We—" his arms tore into a sprint, _"are not going anywhere."_

**a fragment**

Waves washed up the side of the sandbar and withdrew. In the distance, the shore was a bank of sparkling white, flowing with reeds of seagrass and sloping dunes. Sunlight flashed on the channel separating the amputated strip of land from the distant shore. Keith walked along the temporary, exposed ridge. Sand sunk between Kosmo's spread pads, gushing between her nails, flinging behind her light-footed trot. Tiny movement patterns skittered across the cake of sand, disappearing.

Keith raised his face and looked at the shore again. Shiro was hard to see against the beach sand; only his clothes and his broad slanting shadow stood out. Shiro lifted his palm. Keith lifted his palm too. The sun burned hot and blinding on the water. Keith squinted, hardly making out Shiro's cargo pants. Charged, displaced air sizzled past when Kosmo vanished. She returned with Shiro crouched beside her, his hand pressed to her scruff. He rose. Under his boots, the sundried sand-surface cracked and crumbled.

"I've missed the beach," Shiro said. He stood so straight the sunlight beamed evenly from his hair to his shoes. "The last time I saw the ocean feels like a lifetime ago."

"I spent my lifetime in a desert," Keith said. "I'd never been to the beach." He stepped his toes into warm lapping water. Sea gulls cried plaintively and rode the breeze down the coast. Keith said: "I wonder what Hunk and Lance saw when they crash-landed on that frozen planet."

"Wish I could've seen it."

"Me too."

They stood with the sun and the seagulls and the breeze and the ocean. They didn't speak for a while. Kosmo ran down the sandbar and back. Waves flowed sand and shell pieces over Keith's feet until they were gently buried. Sunlight hit Shiro's closed eyes; fine purple capillaries webbed through the lids, darkening their color like peachskin. They slid open a fraction. The pupils were pinpricks.

"The tide's coming in," Shiro said. "This sandbar's gonna disappear soon."

"You can't see it at all during high tide," Keith said.

"Yeah."

"Hey." Keith turned his head, his arms folded over his chest. "You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." Shiro's eyelids were dark. "I've just been getting these migraines lately. Nothing serious."

"I," Keith's voice was low and grave like he'd said the same thing many times before, "don't like the way that sounds."

Shiro made a sound like a laugh, but there was no squeeze of the diaphragm. "It's kinda like this sandbar. It's easy to forget about most of the time. Then the tide ebbs and."

"It's exposed?"

"Yeah. And I don't always know what I'm gonna find lying on the bank."

A bird riding the wind dropped suddenly. A bright splash sprayed and glittered in the air. Two brown wings tore away from the sea. In its beak shined a silver fishbelly.

"The desert was my home. It was all I knew," Keith said. "I never woulda guessed the ocean would be this . . . . . "

On the water sat a large orange sun, melted light running down into the waves. Sea gulls let out long somber notes. The sun stayed fastened where it was.

"I know what you mean." Shiro's scar gleamed and didn't move at all when he smiled and his teeth didn't show. "I only wish Allura were here to see it."

# # #

"Krolia," Keith said. "I'm losing my mind. These visions, I don't know if they're events that have happened or will happen, or will never happen. I don't know. Remind me again. Where are we?"

She told him.

"I can't take this." Keith didn't shout. He probably didn't speak at all. Krolia said nothing either, her eyes glazed, looking inward, perhaps not hearing him. "I'm gonna go find more wood."

"Stay alert," she said, moving her eyes alone to look at him. "And take the wolf with you."

**a fragment**

Across the countryside rose a clear night sky that stretched from horizon to horizon. From out of the ranch bulged a hill with a tree rooted on top. Under the tree, Lance lied supine with his fingers tucked behind his head. He wore a T-shirt and blue jeans that were faded at the knees. Next to him sat Keith, propped on one leg, one arm reached behind him, his wrist bent back, bracing his back-leaning posture. His face was turned up at a yellow, wiry moon. His hair was long and pulled back.

They sat among the crickets and frogs and fireflies and owls. Dry leaves, throbbed by the wind, began to fall, swept free from the branches. Above them, stars wheeled in unfathomable careening patterns of burning gas. The night didn't touch the marks under Lance's eyes; they remained inexplicably bright and luminous.

"There's something I've been thinking about lately," Keith said. "Honerva found her perfect reality. It existed. That ideal."

"Uh-huh, so what?" Lance said.

"So if it existed for her, then statistically—"

"No no. Stop there. I hate math."

"Just listen," Keith said. "If the ideal reality existed for someone like Honerva, you know, someone completely corrupted by quintessence, it's gotta exist for everybody else. Right?"

"I don't know. How would I know that?"

"What I'm trying to say is, Lance, in some other reality, there's a version of you who's together with a version of Allura."

The stars were cold directionless spirals of light, and Keith watched them, his quiet face uplifted. Around him gathered the unbroken sound of night and nature and offered a silence filled with a wondering of the unknown, a pondering of what could-be and what could've-been. Lance was still on his back, his palms supporting his head, not gazing at the stars, but letting them imbed into his retinas, thinking of all the possible pasts he could've lived.

"You know, all of a sudden," Lance said, speaking in that one-way rhetorical fashion of not being responded to, "Honerva seems less psychotic for wanting to travel inter-dimensionally."

Keith didn't respond.

"What about you?" said Lance, and he turned his head sidewise. His hair was overgrown; his face was long and thin. "What's your ideal?"

"I don't know. I don't think I'll know it till I see it."

"Come on. Don't give me that. Just tell me."

"When I was inside the Quantum Abyss, I saw things that already happened, things that would happen, and things that would never happen in our reality but could've happened in a different one. I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. I thought I was going insane."

"Sounds rough."

"But I saw my future, too."

"Yeah?" Lance grinned. "Did you get yourself a wife? Was it Axca? Did you have little purple Galra babies?"

"What? No." Keith's eyes snapped to Lance then snapped away. "No. I was living on Earth, together, with everybody."

"Everybody?" Lance sat up. His weight and outline remained stamped in the grass.

"Yeah, why?"

"I was just wondering," Lance said, "where does Shiro fit in this equation?"

"Why're you saying it like that?"

"Like what?"

"With that tone."

"It's just, you know, one plus one'll never equal six."

"I have no idea what that means."

"Listen, man. I'm trying to tell you: If you stopped ducking behind qualifiers 'cause you're scared—"

"I'm not scared," Keith said.

"Yeah, no, you're absolutely right," Lance said. "You're not scared. You're terrified."

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"I think I do."

"_I_ don't know what you're talking about."

"I think you do."

Keith began to react without knowing he was beginning to react. "What's there to be scared of, huh?" Keith took a breath in and when he let it go, his voice rose and expelled a shout he wasn't expecting. "Because I don't even know what you're trying to say!"

Keith's thoughts were beating hard with the familiar, deep-rooted anger from his childhood as his mind and body began to react to emotions he didn't know he was already beginning to feel and had already been feeling a long time ago.

"Whoa. Calm down, buddy," Lance said. He raised his palms and lowered them in a cautious disarming gesture. "Think of it this way: It may not be here and it may not be now. But statistically—"

**a fragment**

"Are you sick or something?" Keith said. By this time, the anger had mostly subsided, and Keith floated, just outside his body, not feeling the anger anymore, not feeling the hurt anymore because the purest crux of the feeling had appropriated him for too long like it sometimes did (he was still young then), and now he was just tired.

"Tell me the truth. I'm not a little kid. I can handle it."

Shiro's palms were wrapping a helmet. He wore a leather jacket. His black hair had grown out a little. The confrontation did not seem to surprise him. "I—have a disease, and it's getting worse," he said. "The Garrison don't want me up there, and neither does Adam."

"So, what are you going to do?" Keith said.

"I'm going," Shiro said.

"Okay," but now Keith was only listening to himself, somehow uninvolved with his own speaking. "I've got another question for you, then. And you _have_ to tell me," then Keith crossed his arms, just pugnaciously and precociously enough to reassert his adolescence. "Is that Adam guy like your boyfriend or whatever?"

Shiro began to laugh. But when Keith said: "I'm gonna be here waiting," Shiro stopped laughing and looked at Keith, "for you to get back. I don't care what anybody else thinks. Not even the stupid Garrison." Keith side-eyed Shiro without facing him, still looking quite pugnacious and quite precocious, without seeming much like a child anymore, with his arms still crossed. "So don't take too long."

"Yeah." Shiro put on a smile that Keith knew wasn't really a smile at all. "Thank you, Keith."

# # #

The alien wolf drank from a blue pond formed out of the cosmic whale's eclectic, self-sustained ecosystem. Keith squatted next to it. He scooped out two palmfuls of water and wet his face. Tight ripples where his hands had dug into the pool began to expand and roll out toward the banks. The surface flattened again. He looked down into the water. Glassy white stones scalloped the bottom. His eyes stopped short, never extending beyond the surface.

The pond gave back Keith's face, and he saw it the way he didn't remember it. One half of his face showed a scar drooping from his cheekbone to his jaw. Keith watched the scar reflect faintly back at him. Then he lifted his chin and watched the wolf. The wolf pushed its nose along the grass, pacing away. Keith dropped his eyes to the reflection again. He saw his face, unmarked now, and rose and continued deeper into the forest. The wolf turned and followed.

**a fragment**

Keith began to step out and into the hall.

"Hey, Keith?"

Keith turned around, standing in the middle of the door, looking into the bedroom that opened, hollow and dark, from the Castle's belly. The light from the hallway only reached the empty foot of Shiro's bed, as if shadow were not a byproduct of light, but as if shadow were purely shadow itself.

"Yeah," Keith said.

Shiro's hair fell down his shoulders. His eyes darkly looked up at Keith from a dark, rigid down-slant. "How many times are you gonna have to save me," he said, "before this is over?" Shiro's unreadable face never moved. His lips hardly moved either when he spoke.

Keith felt himself softening. He felt the muscles in his face dissolving. He said, "As many times as it takes," and his voice was very gentle.

Shiro's eyes were dark, fixed on Keith, not seeing Keith at all anymore. Keith turned and went out. The door hissed closed.

**a fragment**

The desert was the same as it had always been. The old garage stood gaunt, gutted, and bare, a belt of wind clattering against its tired nailed boards. Sand gusts careened and spun toward the shack before waves of it fell, peacefully, at its entry. The dying autumn light of sunset streamed through the threshold onto Keith, who sat inside on one knee, buffing his self-renovated hoverbike. A shadow slanted and slid into the garage and stretched across the floor and grew until it slid up onto the opposite wall and flattened there. Keith wiped his hands on a black-stained rag without turning around, just watching the flattened shadow on the wall as it lifted its hands and crossed its arms.

"Are you Keith Kogane?" came a voice.

"Who's asking?" Keith snapped the rag over his shoulder, talking to the shadow, never turning around to face the man casting it, already knowing who it was.

"I'm Adam."

"Sorry. I don't know any Adam." Keith walked to the work counter where an assortment of tools were fanned out, still not looking at the man. In his hand was a mildly dinged rotor. "And this is private property, so. You can show yourself out."

"I'm a close friend of Takashi's."

"You mean Shiro?" Keith sat down on the stool. He began adjusting the rotor. He heard the rubber-pattering of Garrison-issued boots five times. It went quiet. The wind clattered outside.

"I heard what happened today," Adam said. Keith saw the black under the rims of his own fingernails, the orange aggravated calluses. He saw the details of his own hands very clearly, trying not to listen, hearing everything regardless. "Takashi," Adam said, "would be disappointed."

Something like a red fever bristled behind Keith's eyes, and he jerked around on the stool, facing the pilot for the first time. The hair on the back of his neck stood up stiff. "_Shiro_," he said, "is gone. He's been gone for months. And do you know what they're saying?" Adam watched Keith out of a calm, restrained face, his glasses high on the bridge of his nose, refracting the dying light coming in from the desert. "A piloting error," Keith said. They stared at each other and inside the garage, there wasn't much space to stare across. "Shiro doesn't make mistakes."

"Up there anybody could make a mistake," Adam said.

"Shiro's not anybody." Keith kicked his boot against the stool's leg, jerking back around. Everything in the garage was very still. "They've given up on him."

"Keith—"

"Shut up." The tools rattled on the work counter; his hands were fists. The short dirty nails dug into his palms. "Fly back to the Garrison, already. I've got stuff to do."

Adam's rubber footfalls went away, growing quieter, ceasing at the door. "So you'll throw away everything, then? Takashi vouched for you. He believed in you. The only reason you made it this far is because of him. Talent alone is useless."

"That all you got to say?"

"He made me promise to keep an eye on you if anything happened up there." The pilot spoke with all the objective pragmatism of an engineer. "I think you're making a mistake."

"I couldn't go back, even if I wanted to. So thanks." Keith's tone fell like an aloof shell of baked sand grinded away. "But I'll make my own path," he said, "without the Garrison."

**a fragment**

Deep in Shiro's eyes blazed those red deadly rings of light, and he pushed with an enormous strength and weight against Keith's Marmora blade. Keith could only lie flat on his back, reduced, shaking under the grating lock of their impasse, gnashing his teeth, burning numb with the total exerted power of his deteriorated body and mind.

"_Please_," Keith said.

Shiro's arms steadily closed in with the ease and automation of machine-iron muscle imitation.

"You're my brother," Keith said.

_Fight back. He's just a hologram._

The voice barely pierced Keith's awareness, not a speaking voice, coming from high above, projected over him.

Keith braced their locked blades above his chest, his muscles going numb with the hot shuddering strain of overextension and failing strength. A blackout threatened his vision.

_Your body is under dangerously high stress. You won't die in the simulation, but if you don't end it now, you'll only prolong your suffering._

Keith spoke through his teeth, saying it for the hundredth time. And for the hundredth time, Shiro's eyes widened around the red glowing rings. For a moment, Keith looked up into Shiro's black pupils where the light had been violated, and saw his own face reflected like a distant image in a well of distilled water.

Then the black pupils shrank again, Keith's reflection sunk away again, and Shiro leaned solidly on Keith's blade.

"Just let go, Keith," Shiro said, knowing exactly what Keith wanted, knowing exactly what Keith would do, those red rings burning, all-consuming, irresistible in his eyes.

_You've won this fight before. You can do it again. _

Keith writhed, disintegrating under the shaking grind of their blades, and turned his face, clasping his eyes closed, making a scarce dying sound of relinquishment, wanting nothing more than to give into the tranquil peace where the rage and anguish could never again boil to the surface.

When Keith opened his eyes, Krolia was sitting on her knees next to him. Keith sat up. The end of the simulation powered down the suit; it had already gone dark. He put his fingers against his own face. The cheek-flesh was burned free of any texture. Having come undone, his hair splayed long and loose.

"You're holding onto the past," said Krolia. Keith already knew this. "The suit exposes the shadows of your subconscious, but the rest falls to you."

"I know," he said.

"That's not Shiro," she said. "It's only a hologram."

"I'm sorry, Krolia," he said. He resigned his Marmorite knife to her hand. "But I'm done."

**a fragment**

The ATLAS commons had four entryways, east, west, north, and south. In the commons, an orange semi-circle sofa buoyed Shiro, who looked vague and abstracted, bent heavily forward in thought. When Keith walked in from the east wing, he saw the back of Shiro's white hair.

"I heard what happened," Keith said. Silence followed him into the room. They didn't speak for a while, Shiro didn't even look over his shoulder. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry."

"Thank you," Shiro said. "That means a lot to me." Still he didn't look over his shoulder, sitting vague and abstracted. Keith followed the sofa around and folded his arms and looked into the middle of the half-circle where Shiro sat with his elbows on his knees. His down-angled face contained an inscrutable inexpression. When he spoke, his voice was inscrutable and inexpressive too.

"Before I left on the Kerberos Mission," Shiro said, "he told me when I came back, he wouldn't be here waiting."

"Shiro." Keith's arms fell to his sides. "I know what you're thinking. But if you start thinking like that, everything will start to make sense in the _wrong_ way. The universe doesn't throw little clues everyone's too shortsighted to understand. It doesn't work like that."

"I know you're right. It's just that it's . . ."

"Easy to believe?"

"Yeah."

"Nothing worth believing in is ever easy."

Shiro still wasn't looking at Keith, but Keith was watching the side of Shiro's face. "You've really grown, Keith. To be honest, I've realized recently how much I've come to depend on you."

"I owe you everything, Shiro. If you'd never given me a second chance, if you hadn't—"

Keith knew he was saying things he'd already said and whatever he was saying wasn't the right thing to say because Shiro still had that non-expression on his face, with his eyes held open like they could've been sleeping but the eyelids wouldn't shut and all he could do was keep watching the world, and so Keith went across the room without feeling himself moving until he stood just in front of Shiro and Shiro finally looked at him, turning his neck back without changing the posture of his shoulders or elbows. And then, still without thinking, Keith took in his hand the longest part of Shiro's white hair that fell limply over his forehead.

"Well," Keith said, "anyway—" and let Shiro's hair slide through his grasp. He felt the absence of melanin palpably. "I bet you could order off the senior citizen menu, no questions asked."

"Was that," Shiro said, beginning not to smile exactly but to lose a little of the immobility in the non-expression, "an insult?"

"No, sir. Not at all. It's just—" Keith dropped into a squat, and Shiro bent his face down now, following, that long strip of hair falling limp again, almost into Shiro's vision. Keith was grinning. "These days, your pigmentation's a little misleading."

**a fragment**

Keith began to step out into the hall. He stepped midstride through the door, beginning again, going forward and backward, in neither direction.

"Hey, Keith?" Shiro said.

In the middle of the door, Keith turned his head, instantaneously repeating the action across an infinite continuum, doing what he'd already done and what he didn't know he'd already been doing before it'd been done. "Yeah," he said.

"How many times are you gonna have to save me before this is over?" Shiro said.

"As many times as it takes," Keith said.

Retrospectively Keith knew in the core reality that he'd already done what had already been happening before the paradox could make sense of itself.

Shiro said: "Then can I ask a favor of you?" and Keith knew, in retrospect, that this hadn't—wouldn't happen—had was—_will_ happen before it didn't or couldn't.

"Yeah, of course," Keith said (_says? will say?)_. "Anything. What do you need?"

The princess's bathroom suite cut back from her bedroom and echoed hollowly with every emitted sound. A royal upholstered armchair accommodated Shiro's width and weight.

Keith knuckled his fingers through a pair of shears and lifted them. He found Shiro's face in the vanity mirror and spoke to it. "You ready?"

"Yeah."

"I'm just gonna chop it off, okay?"

"Yeah, okay."

"So you know, I've never cut hair like this before."

"Don't worry about how it turns out," Shiro said. "I'm gonna crop the sides anyway when you're done. I'd do it myself, but . . . "

"Trust me. I get it."

Shiro smiled. "I guess you would."

In the one hand Keith gathered Shiro's hair and combed the other fingers through it. Keith didn't look in the mirror, but Shiro watched in the glass, his eyes entirely depthless like someone had simply placed two coins there in his face and pressed two indents. Years from then, Keith would remember the long hair that had fallen to the floor, the two opposite colors that somehow emerged, paradoxical and ironic, from a single head.

The shears rang when they slid closed.

# # #

Quietly they sat around the fire. The wolf had its head lying between its forepaws. Keith and Krolia stared into the flames. Wood carvings of Voltron lay, discarded, around them.

"How are you holding up, Keith?"

"Fine," he said. "What about you?"

"As well as I can be," she said.

They were quiet again.

After some time Krolia said: "If you want to wash up first, I'll stand watch."

Keith unfolded his legs and rose. He began to walk toward the forest.

"Keith," Krolia said. She raised her face. Her eyes had flames in them. "What's our goal?"

"We're crossing the Quantum Abyss," he said. He pointed to a red celestial point. "That's our mark."

She closed her eyes. "Victory," she said. "Or death." When her eyes opened again, the pupils were vertical slits. Color flushed into her Galra marks until they stood out, bold, against her face.

"Krolia?"

Her face reverted. She took up a half-complete Voltron carving from the ground, and spun out her knife. "Go ahead," she said. "I'll stand watch."

"Stay here." Keith wasn't speaking to Krolia. The wolf left Keith's heel and sat beside the log Krolia occupied.

"Stop looking at me like that," she said. She began using her knife to shape out the rest of Voltron. "I'll be fine."

"What even was that?"

"It was a stress response," she said. "Prolonged exposure to this environment has remodeled our neural structure. But as long as we remain resilient, these changes won't persist once we reach the other side."

"Maybe you should wash first," he said, "and try to relax."

"No, you go ahead. I just need a little time to myself, is all."

The pond was empty and placid, producing its own light when Keith reached it. It fanned blue watery light into the gnarled canopy of branches made by the overgrown trees crouching toward the banks. He peeled off his bodysuit and went in. Water furled over his feet. Smooth white stones slid under him as he waded deeper. When he reached the center, he opened his mouth, sucked air into his lungs, and closed his eyes then his lips. Like that, he let himself drop to the glass-stone bottom.

Deep in the sky, dark stars spun like suffocation.

For a very long time, the pool's surface remained flat and unbroken.

**a fragment**

It was like listening to a voice underwater, and everything was dark with distant throbbing lights lurking in the cosmos. A thrumming cyropod possessed Shiro's attention and held him in a motionless bodily grip for hours, for days. He stood, immovable, and watched the pod. An icy sweat started to rise from his pores as he listened to the underwater voice murmur to him.

_We're connected,_ the undersea voice continued, _you and me._

"I'm not like you." Shiro spoke robotically, as though he'd said the same thing many times before.

_You've been broken and reformed—and reformed again._

Something like melted iron roiled Shiro's stomach. He reached to touch his arm. His hand fumbled across his body to the intangible phantom-limb of where the arm had been taken away.

_Face it. How can you win? _the voice said down, down, where the black violent waters had been churning for years now, three, No, four: _You've already been defeated._

Shiro grabbed the sides of his head and pushed against his hard, burning, pulsating temples. He began to make urgent gasping sounds, feeling the pressure of the dark undersea depths worming through his brain matter. His two arms and neck writhed out of the wet cling of the shirt he wore, plastered, ice-cold, to his skin.

_Did you really think a monster like you could ever escape a monster like me?_

Shiro clamped his eyes shut. Feeling nothing, he only heard the thud of his prosthetic knuckles connecting with the cyropod. When his eyes opened, shards of glass showered down from the broken mirror. In the bits of mirror remaining, an almost unrecognizable Sendak stared out. The red prosthetic eye was gone; a pupil and iris watched Shiro from the glass. A shattered un-Galra half-face stared back at him.

The hot metal in Shiro's stomach rose, his hands struck the sink, his head pitched forward, tears springing to his eyes. The roiling fluid seemed to reach out of his lips like a coagulated black aluminum mass and scream down the drain.

**a fragment**

Keith sat in bed with the lights off. His comm was cupped in both of his hands. The holoscreen hummed with light frequencies, displaying in front of him a miniature frame of his own face and behind it, a larger frame filled with Shiro's face. Keith wore a black soft-wash tank top. Shiro wore glasses and a crewneck; everywhere around him poured crisp daylight.

"Krolia told me you've been going through a hard time," Shiro said.

"She called you?" Keith said.

"Yeah." Shiro's attention never diverted from the screen, watching Keith's image in the residual lightwash of the comm's display. "It's been a while since I've heard from you, though. Thought I'd try my odds and see if I could catch the legendary Black paladin in his downtime."

"We're not paladins anymore."

"Keith Kogane," Shiro said exaggeratedly. "Still a fan favorite."

Keith groaned. "You're famous too, you know. So what did Krolia say?"

"She said you're having some trouble pulling out of a slump and that I might be able to help," he said. "I don't know how true that is. But I thought I'd give it a shot. What's been going on?"

"Kolivan says I'm out of balance."

"Out of balance?"

"Do you remember the suit I wore during the Trials of Marmora?"

"Yeah, I remember."

"Well, it's been repurposed. It allows the wearer to explore the landscape of their own subconscious and unpack traumatic experiences. But each time I go in," Keith said, "I lose."

"If the suit isn't helping, then maybe you should look for an alternative. Pidge might know."

"Or maybe it's impossible to fix."

"You're giving up?" Shiro seemed to know it wasn't surrender. He seemed to know it was beyond giving up and beyond defeat. "I know it's not easy, and I'm not sure if anyone can tell you the right answer right now. But there are other ways. You could try traditional psychotherapy."

"Yeah, I could," Keith said. "But, what if I don't want to stop?"

It went silent on Shiro's end of the transmission. They both dropped their eyes away from the screen. Shiro was the first to lift his eyes again. Keith was the first to speak again.

"That didn't come out right."

"It's okay, Keith. I understand." Shiro's voice had changed. It seemed duplicitous, as if he were speaking for two different minds. "Actually, there's something I've been keeping from you too."

"Shiro." Keith's tone was low and grave. "What is it?"

# # #

When Keith's head broke through the water's surface again, he inflated his lungs to full capacity in a single indrawn gasp. Invigorated blood rushed through his head, his view darkening. His eyesight returned and he pushed his hair back, deeply breathing a few more times.

"Keith."

His head jerked around. Krolia came from the forest with the wolf at her heel. Relief washed through her expression when she found him. "I thought I saw," she said. Weak and unsteady, she touched her head, as though struck with a case of vertigo. Her eyes shut and rolled back. They rolled forward again, opening. "In that solar flare, I saw you."

"I saw Shiro," Keith said. "We're having different visions."

"I saw you," she said again. "Here. Exactly as you are now." He watched her watching him. "You went under and never came back up."

They looked at each other. He turned up his palms, and remembered the calm wavering haze of opening his eyes underwater as he had let his breath go. The white stones were all around, undisturbed, like bone. Everything had been a delicate white dreamscape.

"These solar flares are more than time collapses," she told him. "We're seeing into other timelines."

"That doesn't make any sense," he said.

She met his eyes silently; her irises seemed to be spinning.

"Mom." The lack of euphemisms jolted Krolia a little straighter. Her eyes went still with clarity, and the vertiginous fever abated.

"I know you're right, Keith." Her fingers emitted a stiff snap. The wolf sat at attention. "I'm heading back to camp. Take all the time you need."

She picked her way back through the forest. Her footfalls produced no sound. The wolf remained, sitting upright, its front legs locked into a sentry's stance. Its yellow eyes stared brilliantly at Keith.

**a fragment**

"What's the status on Shiro's migraines?" The wind blew back Keith's jacket. He sustained the bike's speed, racing steadily through the canyon. The communicator in his helmet transmitted the sound of Lance's movements: the rattle of dishes, hefty-heeled footfalls, a bit awkward and clunky.

"They think it's his eyesight that's causing them. So he got himself a pair of fresh specs," Lance said. "You'd know that if you talked to him yourself."

"Been busy."

"Too busy to call Shiro. But apparently not too busy to call me about him. Where are you, anyway? Do I hear a hoverbike?"

"Focus, Lance. Have the migraines gotten any better?"

"Dunno. Maybe you should call and ask _him_. Come on, say it with me. Call. Shiro."

"Can you check?"

"Why can't you? Just take Kosmo and _vwooosh_ you're there."

"I'm not on Earth." Keith slowed and jerked the steering, turning sharply. "And that's not what teleporting sounds like." He accelerated again, flying down the flat highland.

"Why don't you ask Shiro what it sounds like?"

"Will you keep tabs on him for me?"

"Gross," said Lance. "You're making me feel like a slimeball."

"It's for his own good."

"That's exactly what a slimeball would say."

"Lance," Keith said. "Just do it. I've got a bad feeling about this."

"Lately, I've been feeling pretty bad too. Not specifically about Shiro's migraines, but you know. About a lot of unspecific things."

Keith released the brake and decelerated to a stop. He put his boot on the ground and tugged his goggles down around his throat. "You wanna talk about it?"

"Thought you were busy."

"I am," Keith said. Neither person spoke for a moment. Keith cut the engine; the small puttering vibrations ceased. He settled into the seat and prepared to stay in one place for a long time. "Wanna talk about Allura?"

"Allura," Lance said. "Hey, do you remember when she . . ."

Keith listened and the sun began to descend and the mountains began to submerge the land in jagged massive shadow. The bike's turbines had long gone cold. Idly his elbows rested on the steering. A few low stars blinked coldly into the sky. Night had fallen, and still Keith listened, neither encouraging nor discouraging, seated back on the bike, patient and receptive.

"Do you remember when she . . ."

Yes, Keith remembered quite a bit, but not as much as Lance. And as Keith listened, he came to find that Lance wanted to talk about everything, as if he were paying up on an expensive social debt, having accumulated too much silence and too much solitude for too long, and now there was nothing he could not talk about, and Keith's thrifty replies did little to attenuate the fundamental extroversion Lance could not restrain or modulate anymore: "I find it hard to believe," he went on, "Shiro didn't choose you. If I were him, I woulda already taken you by the ears like a mating Yalmor and—wait, what?" Lance stopped. Keith offered nothing and listened calmly. Lance said: "Shut up. Don't you dare say anything about this. That's not what I meant."

"I wasn't gonna say anything," Keith said. "Besides, he didn't not choose me. I wasn't even in the lineup, buddy." He lifted the goggles over his eyes and adjusted the bridge on his nose. "I'm out. Take it easy, Lance."

"Never thought I'd say this, but you're actually a pretty good listener. Shiro's got no idea what he's—"

Keith cut the comms. The hoverbike rattled into an easy purr. He gassed the engine and blew ahead, hurdling across the windswept plateau. When the highland's edge came on him, he launched off the cliff, never slowing down.

**a fragment**

As Keith piloted the Black lion through wide empty space, Shiro stood quietly behind Keith's shoulder. "When we found you," Keith said, "after you'd been held captive by the Galra again, did we—I mean did I—Did you ask me for a favor?"

Shiro looked across the side of Keith's face. "I don't know." Shiro's hair was all white, and his eyebrows too. His Galra-tech arm was gone, only a glowing stub of an idle socket now. "If I had asked you for anything, it would've been my imitation, Kuron. At the time, I was still lost in the void."

"Kuron," Keith said. "That was his name?"

"Yeah. At least, I think so. I'm still sorting out his memories." Shiro didn't speak again for a while. Then he looked at Keith's face again, and a kind of hyperawareness prickled Keith's neck-hair, and he thought he could feel Shiro's attention keenly sweeping the textureless burned flesh drooping down his cheek. Keith turned his eyes. Then he turned his face. The cockpit's dimensions made the air close, and they seemed to be murmuring to each other, almost secretively, in private. "Keith . . . is there something on your mind?"

"It's nothing. I was just remembering things I saw while crossing the Quantum Abyss."

The set of Shiro's eyebrows had softened a little with his new pale coloring.

And once again—Keith abstained from pointing out the irony, so he wouldn't mention it to Shiro: But he kept thinking that Kuron sounded like _kuro_ which was the antithesis of _shiro_, and Shiro's hair was all white now, which could imply a lot of things, and the black lion, also a kind of antithetical, had retained Shiro's consciousness so that Allura could transfer the cosmic energy into Kuron's body; and that's when Shiro's hair had not acquired its all-whiteness, but in fact lost all of its color.

So maybe this whole time _shiro_ didn't mean what Keith had thought it meant: Maybe this whole time it didn't mean a color at all. And where language was concerned, Kuron meant an acquisition of presence while the other meant an absence like desert sand being fed into a sieve, never filling, just steadily sifting through for an eternity, never changing. So it wasn't that Keith had surpassed Shiro, earning the Black Lion; it was that Shiro's hair had lost all of its color, just the way the disease would have one day deteriorated his body.

"I know what it's like to lose someone," Allura had said, "who's completely irreplaceable."

Keith, however, would never accept it.

**a fragment**

The apartment was tidy and smart. A single bookcase rested against the wall. A lamp on the bedside table was turned on. The blue shade flared a cone of light directly onto the glass surface where a pair of eye-glasses lay. Shiro sat on the bed. Curtis sat in an armchair where a curtain fell primly over a window. Off to the side, against the wall, Keith stood with his arms crossed. They were mid-conversation, Curtis mid-sentence. "—dysregulation of neurological response systems, causing functional impairment."

"Stop talking like that," Keith said. "It's not helping."

Curtis continued: "This is a normal response to trauma," and then Keith's ears started to ring. It grew louder the longer Curtis spoke. "It's essentially biological markers disclosed by stress. Finding treatment—"

"I SAID YOU'RE NOT HELPING." Unaware he was shouting, Keith heard nothing but the hot ringing in his own ears, grown too loud for his eyes to see. "SO JUST STOP TALKING." When Curtis came into view again, he was sitting rigid and upright on his spine, his eyes widened slightly. Keith had to remember why his own mouth was open. Then he had to remember to shut it.

"Keith," Shiro said calmly. "He's just trying to help."

The hot ringing slowly drained out of Keith's head. "You're right." Keith's voice fell to speaking volume. "I'm sorry," and it took some effort to look at Shiro directly. "You saw something, didn't you?"

"I—was confused."

"I got that," Keith said. "But what did you see?"

"I saw—" Shiro searched the back of his eyelids, and Keith saw Shiro's eyes moving, closed. Then finally: "I don't know." His eyes dragged open again.

"How about Sendak?" said Keith. "Think you could've seen him, and that's why you snapped?"

"I'm not sure," said Shiro. "I remember walking into the bathroom. And then I remember the glass. It's all scrambled up."

"In the past, Sendak got inside your head. But I cut him down, Shiro. There's no way he's coming back."

"I know that." Shiro sat very still. "But, somehow, when I faced him that last time, he and I were—It was like we were, I don't know, connected somehow. Like I was half of him and he was half of me. We'd both been weaponized by Haggar, and installed with similar cybernetics. I was just—the weaker model."

"You're nothing like Sendak," Keith said. "He was hungry for power. You weren't given a choice. You never asked to have your arm taken away."

"Settle down, Keith," said Curtis. "You don't need to get yourself all worked up." Keith rigidly leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms tautly over his chest. His thoughts throbbed with an unspecific and undirected useless outrage. "The enemy was defeated two years ago. It's time to move forward now. The epoch of Voltron has passed."

"You're both right," said Shiro. "I don't know what I was thinking." He exhaled like he was trying to chuckle and pushed his fingers lengthwise across his scalp. White hair hissed under his nails. "I'm sorry you had to come all the way here, Keith."

"You don't need to apologize." Keith's eyes snapped to Curtis. "Keep the mirrors covered." Curtis sat intently in the armchair and looked at Keith, a little indignant and restrained, from a down-slanted face.

"It's not his fault," said Shiro.

"It's not your fault either," said Keith.

Shiro was silent.

"It's not your fault," Keith said.

**a fragment**

They were both outfitted in formal military dress when they stepped into the nondescript ATLAS guest room. The door whirred shut behind them and the light came on. The room provided them with privacy. Dinner-table tension had followed them inside, and they spoke to each other in low, tense voices.

"Keith," Shiro said. Keith stood straight with his arms stiff at his sides. Ribbons and medals furnished Shiro's uniform. "I haven't seen you blow up at everyone like that since you were a cadet. Did something happen?"

"No."

"Then why—"

"I'm not enough."

"Enough?" Shiro stared at the back of Keith's hair. "Enough for—"

"It doesn't matter that I." Keith's mouth froze open. He twisted his neck around to look at Shiro, alarmed by what had nearly come out. "It doesn't matter," he said.

"I'm trying the best that I can. But I'm not following you, Keith."

"I'm no Brainiac, Shiro." Even before he began to say it, the disgust started to turn his stomach, as if he had shoved his hands out in front of Shiro, presenting the dried-up desert of his childhood, making him look at it. "I'm not some technical genius."

"Nobody asked you to be." Shiro studied his face, trying to understand. "You'd put Pidge out of the job if you were."

"Tch." Keith shrank, his hands out in the open, his palms displayed, empty. Shiro moved his mouth. He began to say more. "Forget it," Keith said. "I had too much to drink." Keith felt in his stomach where the alcohol sat, and he thought of himself bursting into the bathroom, his palms hitting the sink, his head thrusted down, his mouth bulging open as the empty endless sieve of sand came pouring out in equal parts rage and shame. "Let's just go back now, okay?"

"Is that what you—"

"Yeah," Keith said. He started toward the door, moving past Shiro. "I'm going back. You coming or not?"

"Keith, Keith, _Keith._" Shiro clasped Keith's shoulder. It was his left hand. "Hang on."

On the right, the Altean cybernetic reached out, going beyond Shiro's natural range, disengaging, floating away to the door. It clapped off the lights. The room went dark, leaving only the lightwash from the arm-tech socket pulsing between them. The light laid blue and soft across Shiro's facial bones.

"Power down," Shiro said. The light faded, the room's dimensions grew smaller until Keith saw nothing but how the lights had been turned off. Keith and Shiro were standing very close to each other. Weight and metal dropped to the floor. It was the hand, Keith knew, dead below the switch.

"Keith, like this," Shiro said. "Is there anything you want to tell me?"

"Is there anything _you_ want to tell me, Shiro?"

"I'm married."

"Uh-huh. I was at the ceremony."

Shiro said nothing, and he had an expression almost like he was beginning to understand, but more like he had to remember what it was from a time he didn't quite know. His hand slid from Keith's shoulder to his wrist. He drew Keith's palm upon his neck.

"What are you doing?" Keith said.

Shiro pressed the inside of Keith's hand against his throat and said: "Say my name." The vocal cords slid languorously.

"Your name?"

"Yeah."

"Shiro?"

"My real one."

Keith's tongue muscle tested it first. "Takashi?"

Under Keith's hand, Shiro's carotid artery began to swell and throb. Shiro said nothing, pressing Keith's palm against his pulse, with all the lights turned off.

"Takashi."

Shiro's artery inflated again, flowing, surging, and Keith thought then of the desert and the dead river bed suddenly thundering, against all nature, with that strong pound of water, the way it had when it was young and new, Keith standing in the middle of it. He knew what it meant. And suddenly he understood what Lance had said. That the qualifier had inflicted the strict condition of blood-brothers on Keith and Shiro which then incurred the untraversability, the impossibility of ever reaching the other side, leaving Keith to leap perpetually and unprogressively across stones where nothing ever would—or even could—change.

"I get it." Keith spoke in undertone, murmuring. Keith was lightly bent back, slightly away from Shiro, lifting his hands and, using the strength of his wrists, he held Shiro's face. As they looked into each other's eyes, it was like waiting for that clockhand to change without seeing it, just feeling it charging. That solid excruciating un-progression lived a thousand times over in the dark.

Then, using the power of his wrists, he dragged Shiro's face down.

When Shiro laughed, it was only air, so Keith knew it wasn't a laugh. His breath blew cold, and Keith was silent, watching in the dark where Shiro's eyes were, seeing the saline gleam, no pupils and no whites, just a dim glimmer, hearing the faint unsteady backward steps of Shiro's boots as he began to move away, diminishing out of view. There was the rise and fall of brittle unused sheets. Shiro had sunk back onto the bed.

"You okay?"

Shiro held his head in his hands. "Yeah, just—leave the lights off for a sec."

"Everything's gonna be fine, Shiro."

Shiro had an expression like he was hanging off a cliff by his fingernails, one-handedly, with no Altean- or Galra-tech prosthetic, just gripping himself with his half-strength alone. His engagement ring was bright, even in the dark.

"Keith, I . . ."

"You don't have to say anything." Keith went to a knee and looked up into Shiro's face.

"Everything's gonna be okay. I'm not asking you to second-guess the choices you've made," he said. His voice was very gentle, and the firm muscles of his face had become soft, the way wax grows soft with a light held near it. "I was just, I don't know. I wasn't thinking straight." Keith didn't sound sad or disappointed or anything of the sort, just serious and concerned and soft. "This is my fault. So don't blame yourself. It was an accident. He doesn't even need to know." Keith rose, still speaking very gently. "Come on. Let's head back. The others are waiting."

**a fragment**

It was never night inside the base, but activity followed a natural ebb and flow, a rise and fall. Movement had reduced to a dull mutter now, and they found the training deck's control room unoccupied. A hologram terminal glowed at the front wall. Curtis watched Keith's leather-gloved hands enter the command prompt. When his hands stopped, they both looked down through the window and their eyes fell two stories onto the deck where Shiro was waiting. He wore the stealth armor of the Marmora Blades. He looked over his shoulder, watching the door grind shut behind him. Both his own hand and the Altean one were closed into fists.

Keith said, "That suit he's wearing will show us what's going on inside his head."

Then the deck began to metamorphose. The walls dissolved, washing out into the empty slate of an unknown un-place, acquiring a bright blankness like a snapped polaroid before the film has begun to develop. Then the room's panels began to flip and flow like falling domino pieces, running across the floor and walls, blurring as they gained speed. Then rising out of the whitewash came the uncanny glow of advanced alien machinery. Outer space engulfed the room. A celestial body burned nearby. In the middle of the open platform, two stories below the control room, Shiro steadily stood, getting ready.

Curtis said, "That's not Earth." His neck was bent forward to watch the simulation from their height in miniature. "It looks Galra."

"I know this place," Keith said.

"If it's Sendak that's haunting him, shouldn't he be on Earth, the last location he saw Sendak alive?"

"I know why he's having episodes." Keith's hands hovered over the terminal. He began to enter the code for termination. "I've got to shut it down."

"Wait." Curtis gripped Keith's shoulder, spinning him around halfway. "You're not even going to give him a chance?"

For a moment, they glared at each other, eye to eye, both thinking themselves right, both thinking they knew better than the other.

Then they both looked through the window as cyropods began to appear in blazing red lines. Dark eerie nuclei hung inside, submerged in stasis.

Keith jerked his shoulder away. His hands started to punch in the code again. "You wouldn't understand."

"Somebody else is down there with him."

Keith knew, without having to look, that he was already too late. "Shiro hasn't told you everything, has he?"

"I never asked him to."

Wearing his paladin armor, bare-headed, Shiro crossed the platform slowly. His hair was bi-colored, paradoxical, his face dark and inscrutable and unhuman like a caricature wrought of indestructible anatomical machine. "Hello," he said, stopping midway between the pods and himself.

"You're—" Shiro said. His Altean prosthetic floated down, powerless, at his side. Keith could see only the whites of those eyes as Shiro stared, the color drained from his face, frozen in blood-dead paralysis.

"I know," Shiro said. He closed his hand. His fist burned a deadly plasmatic purple. He smiled. "Not Sendak." He tore into a sprint.

**a fragment**

When Shiro's eyes came open, Keith's face floated above him, gazing down into Shiro's face, receptive and very attentive. Shiro's eyeballs sank backward. Keith supported Shiro's neck in the crook of his elbow and waited attentively for Shiro to open his eyes again.

"Keith," Shiro said. "I lost," and he began to sit up.

Cupping Shiro with his chest, Keith held him down. "It's okay, Shiro. Take it slow." Heavily, wearily, Shiro sagged into the circle of Keith's arms. He had a morose up-tilted face and the eyes of a person ruminating on a cycle of despairing thoughts. The white hair didn't make him look like an old man; he didn't look aged at all. He just looked like a person who never slept.

"This must be like what you said before," Keith said, "about the sandbar."

"What?"

"That you didn't know what was lying on the bank."

"You lost me."

"When we," Keith murmured low now, "went to the beach?"

"The beach . . . The last time I went to the beach feels like a lifetime ago." Shiro shut his eyes. That pastless unexplained scar split his face in two. "I'm sorry, Keith. But I don't remember."

"No," Keith said. "It's not you." Before he could stop himself, without knowing he was moving, he dropped his head and put his forehead against Shiro's forehead. In the doorway, Curtis stood, watching them from behind where he couldn't see much, except their two slanted profiles connected at the face.

Keith muttered, "It's me this time," and even without changing his line of sight, Curtis watched Keith's bent head fixed quietly to Shiro's face.

a fragment

When Keith turned to the door, Shiro didn't rise from the guest bed, still looking like he was hanging off a cliff, gripping himself by the thin, keratin skin of his fingernails. His Altean arm was still lying by the light, powered off, its palm up, the metal fingers passively curled and dead.

"You'll leave," Shiro said, "without hearing what I have to say?"

Keith stopped. "Is there something you have to say?"

Keith saw the beginning movement of Shiro's lips. Then the door whirred and light opened onto the room, onto Shiro's face. Shiro raised his hand, shielding his eyes. Keith swung his head around. Curtis stood in the door. His ATLAS uniform was all shadow, black against the light behind him. His attention went from Shiro, to Keith, then to the disabled prosthetic on the floor. He bent to pick it up.

"It's my fault," Keith said mechanically when Shiro didn't say anything.

"Keith Kogane," Curtis said. He passed and crossed the room. "You can relax. All your friends were worried when you stormed out like that." Curtis slid to a knee and put the prosthetic in position and powered it on. Shiro hadn't moved or said a word. "If you two are done here, let's go back, Takashi, and finish our dinner."

Shiro began to operate as if he had two minds: One that attended to what was going on around him. One that attended to his inner thoughts. And neither mind could agree with the other on anything.

"You don't look well," Curtis said.

"I'm just a little tired," Shiro said.

"That's what you always say."

"Keith," Shiro said. "Wait."

"Yeah," said Keith.

"I wanted to say I'm sorry."

"What's there to be sorry for?"

"It was me," Shiro said, and Keith didn't understand. "It was my fault." Shiro was smiling, and Keith searched Shiro's eyes, still trying to understand.

The scar bisected Shiro's expression, and the halves were in conflict. "I'm unsalvageable," he said, and flexed his Altean hand. His smile wasn't a smile; it'd never been a smile. "And I'm sorry." Then he lightly put the robot hand over his eyes and it was like the two minds were taking turns speaking without knowing what the other had said before it took its turn to talk. "Don't worry about it, Curtis. It's nothing. I'm just a little tired."

"Takashi," Curtis said. "You always say that."

# # #

"Keith," Krolia said. "I think we've made it."

Keith rose to his feet and saw the red celestial point approaching. He said, "It's been two years."

— When the bells rang, he watched with the other guests and did nothing and said nothing. He wore all black and Shiro wore all white. And again, Keith thought about where language was concerned and the issues of irony and paradoxes, and found that _Keith_ could almost be like _Kuron_ which could almost be like _kuro_.

Keith's black hair had grown long.

He decided not to cut it.

And this too: The antithesis of the ideal was occurring right in front of him. And seeing a thing's opposite was the same as seeing the thing for itself. So now he knew the answer to the question he'd been asked or would be asked or would never be asked, and realization either came too early or it came too late, and in this case, it had come too late and too early simultaneously, and never at the right time.

(if you stopped ducking behind qualifiers (statistically . . . (the one where he didn't try to qualify it (exists, right?)))) —

"We can finally finish our mission," Keith said.

The end was here. They had reached the other side.

**and in the time between . . .**

"How did you know to come save me when my ship crashed?"

Orange evocative light gleamed on Shiro's scar and a warm somber wind blew from the east. A few stars quivered in the part of the horizon that had already begun to turn dusk. Keith folded his arms and watched the mountain range sink into the sky, thinking, _Maybe this'll be the one_. Then he began to leap across the high directionless stones endlessly and said: "There's something you should see."

Keith led Shiro back into the house.


End file.
